I had a conversation earlier this evening with a good friend of mine.  She keeps me on my feat with her whit and honesty.  She’s also pretty good and making sure I never get a big head.  Tonight she reminded me that I’m average.  I’m 5’9″ and 168 lbs.  Both average specs.  My GPA and SAT scores were both average.  She was quick to explain that I’m also average looking (geez, thanks).  I kept waiting for the “but,” but it never came.  Her pep talk, if you could call it that, was specifically tailored to reminding me that I’m average.

Well, she’s right.  I’m average across the board.  That’s ok.  I’m perfectly average and that’s worked a-o-k for the last 31 years.  One way to look at it, is that I’m not below average.  It’s like the old saying goes, to the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world…even if you’re average.

In the TV drama that originated from the movie of the same name, Friday Night Lights, the rallying cry for the team is “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose.”  Coach Taylor impresses this statement and idea on to his team every game, before they take the field.  The statement is certainly more that just words…there’s meaning behind it.  At a simple level, one could argue, that he’s getting at the idea of winning not being the most important thing.  If you will, simply taking the field, knowing you’ve offered your very best makes you a winner.  I can completely understand that point of view.  It makes you feel good on the inside.  We connect with it because the idea of the indomitable human spirit is inspiring and worth paying attention to.

The rub of course is that this is television; good television, but still television.  This isn’t real life.  In real life, we want to believe that simply having Clear Eyes and Full Hearts allows us to have a moral victory and ideally something more.  From recent real experience, I can tell you that’s not the case.  Actually, it’s heartbreaking to know you gave your best, and yet you still lost.  It’s humbling and certainly makes you question if giving your all was worth it.  After all, you could have just as easily failed by giving 50%.

In the movies, we root for the underdog.  We cheered Rocky when he was fighting Apollo Creed.  We wished Diane Court would come to her senses in Say Anything and give love a chance with John Cusack’s character LLoyd Dobler.  We felt empty on the inside when Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon split-up in Fever Pitch.  We want the underdog to win.  It gives us hope to know that yes, the small can triumph over the big, the week can best the mighty and real effort is a catalyst to achieving your goals.  Without movies, without stories, without real world exceptions, we wouldn’t believe – and without that belief our lives would lose a certain amount of meaning.

I was engaged once for 3 months.  Not 4, not 3 months and two weeks; no, 3 months to the day (believe me, the irony sticks with me).  Despite effort, despite the grand gestures and the little things, despite wanting, wishing and hoping, despite the capitulations and compromises…it didn’t last.  The mountains were tall and rocky too climb.  Blood was thicker than water.  The differences were valued more than the similarities.  Love was not enough.  In the movies, nothing would have kept us apart.  In the movies, there would have been a realization that things that brought us together were worth fighting for.

But, real life isn’t the movies.

In reality, in this world, in this life, the sad fact is that too often Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can Lose is the rule, not the exception.  Sorry, Coach Taylor, I hate to disagree with you, but the truth is the truth.

The other night I couldn’t sleep. So i started flipping through the channels and landed on a movie that’s always perplexed me: Indecent Proposal. If you read any review or synopsis of the movie, the plot line is essentially love vs. money. We love to think that love conquers money. We love to believe that passion and emotion trump cold hard cash. We believe it, because it’s a nice sentiment.

The Beatles of course challenged that idea with the song titled “Money,” in which they wrote “The best things in life are free. But you can keep ‘em for the birds and bees. Now give me money, (that’s what I want) that’s what I want.” Money is a seductive and powerful influencer. It makes people do silly things.

In the movie Indecent Proposal a man is offered $1,000,000 for one night with his wife by a billionaire. Now let me be clear, one night does not equal sex. It simply means one night. I’ll spare you all the details of the movie, but I do want to hit on the key portions of the story that have always left me perplexed:

1. They agree to offer
2. The man making the proposal makes it clear to the wife that nothing will happen that she doesn’t want to happen
3. She ends up sleeping with him
4. The married couple divorce because the husband can’t get past the fact his wife slept with another man
5. The wife ends up dating the guy who made the proposal
6. They break up because the guy who made the proposal realizes, “she never would have looked at me like she did him”
7. The husband and wife get back together because the husband realizes “…that the things that people in love do to each other, they remember. And if they stay together, it’s not because they forget. It’s because they forgive.”

Ok here is why I’m perplexed…we love to take sides in movies. We love to choose person A over B. A good movie sucks you in, creates the emotional connection, and makes your brain hurt because the choices are difficult. Publications like The New York Times reviewed this movie when it came out over a decade ago. Their reviews depicted the difficulty in choosing sides between the husband and the wife. Was the husband to blame because he agreed to let his wife spend the night with the billionaire? Was the woman to blame for agreeing to spend the night and then subsequently sleeping with the billionaire? I kid you not, pundits, reviewers and critics have debated this topic.

So why am I perplexed? Because I see this as really simple. The wife is to blame. Not only did she agree to spend the night, but she made the choice to sleep with the billionaire. She did both of these with her own free will. I wont even touch the whole decision to then divorce her husband (she filed) and date the billionaire. The husband was a saint for somehow staying in love with her, fighting for her after he lost her and then of course taking her back.

She chose money twice over love…

I don’t get it? Why is it so simple for me? What am I missing? Help me out.

Traditions are a funny thing.  Some are easy to let go.  Others, we hold on to with a grip reminiscent of someone holding on to the side of a cliff…fearful that they could fall if for even a second they release that grip.  We grow up with traditions.  Some of us open presents on Christmas morning because that’s what we did as children.  Some of us go to church on Sundays, because it’s what we did with our parents.  Yes, our traditions stick with us.

I was having a discussion this weekend with some friends about funeral traditions. The topic was relevant because my grandmother had just passed away; she was 92. Anyhow the conversation morphed from just funerals traditions to traditions in general. By the end of the night it was clear that we’ve become cherry pickers when it comes to traditions. As a society and a people, we’ve elected to arbitrarily choose which traditions we want to maintain, enforce apply and expect of one another. If you will, we’ve elected to live in the gray and avoid black and white.

For example, take weddings, or rather the concept of marriage.  Today, we fret over the size, shape and of course brand of diamond ring we buy.  Some how, the purchasing of a diamond for a woman has become a modern day tradition.  I put emphasis on the idea of modern day, because ironically, the original wedding ring tradition was that a man provided a simple metal band.  As wikipedia tells us:

In older times, the wedding rings were not only a sign of love, but were also linked to the bestowal of ‘earnest money’. According to the prayer book of Edward VI: after the words ‘with this ring I thee wed’ follow the words ‘This gold and silver I give thee’, at which point the groom was supposed to hand a leather purse filled with gold and silver coins to the bride.

Historically, the wedding ring was rather connected to the exchange of valuables at the moment of the wedding rather than a symbol of eternal love and devotion. It is a relic of the times when marriage was a contract between families, not individual lovers. Both families were then eager to ensure the economical safety of the young couple. Sometimes it went as far as being a conditional exchange as this old (and today outdated) German formula shows: ‘I give you this ring as a sign of the marriage which has been promised between us, provided your father gives with you a marriage portion of 1000 Reichsthalers’.

If you will, back in the day (roughly 1215 during the medieval era), a ring was provided as a means for initiating the contract between two people…where that contract would provide a dowry (money, goods, or estate that a woman brings to her husband in marriage) to the man. So, basically the bride gets a ring, the parents no longer have to support their child and the groom gets a gift (financial and/or other). Talk about a 3-way trade!

Now of course today, we still exchange rings, albeit a much more expensive one, but we lose the dowry. Could you imagine a situation where someone proposed without a ring…or with simply a gold/silver band? For starters, the man would be considered cheap and the woman would obviously feel embarrassed.  It could never happen, because rings today are status symbols.  The larger the ring, the more he cares…the more money he makes…the more he loves you…the luckier she is….etc.

We accept that the times have changed from the medieval days and that there’s a new socially accepted tradition for getting engaged, but society at large would never tolerate the idea of a dowry (yes, I know in some cultures dowries are still exchanged). To that, I say hypocrisy.  By accepting so much grey, we’ve lost the idea of a tradition.  Instead, we’ve cobbled together something we call tradition, but in truth, resembles a sloppily stitched patchwork quilt.

Perhaps, that patchwork quilt is who we are as a society.  After all, we are the country known as a melting pot.  The institute of marriage is just one of many examples of the hypocrisy of traditions.  But, it’s one we can all understand and relate to; that’s why I picked it for this post.  Every day, we blur the lines and manufacture new traditions by eliminating the traditions of the past that we no longer find relevant.  In doing so, are we negating the relevancy of those new traditions?  Well, seeing as a diamond is forever has been a slogan since 1947, perhaps not.